environment India Politics: climate refugees denialists glacial melt irrigation mountains
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 27: River Deep, Mountain High
The LA Times, on Mount Everest. So to speak.
A warming climate is melting the glaciers of Mount Everest, shrinking the frozen cloak of Earth’s highest peak by 13% in the last 50 years, researchers have found.
Rocks and natural debris previously covered by snow are appearing now as the snow line has retreated 590 feet, according to Sudeep Thakuri, a University of Milan scientist who led the research.
The pessimistic view of Earth’s tallest peak was presented during a meeting Tuesday of the American Geophysical Union in Cancun, Mexico.
Researchers said they believe the observed changes could be due to human-generated greenhouse gases altering global climate, although their research has not established a firm connection.
The team reconstructed the glacial history of the area using satellite imagery and topographic maps of Everest and the surrounding 713-square-mile Sagarmatha National Park. Their statistical analysis shows that the majority of the glaciers in the national park are retreating at an increasing rate, Thakuri said.
Why? Because it’s not there. May 15:
Once we set aside the iconic importance of a shrinking Mount Everest, the really ominous facts about disappearing ice caps in the Himalayas are the numbers of people whose lives depend on them. Whether it’s for irrigation, hydroelectric generation, or clean drinking water, this steady flow from the world’s tallest mountains is crucial for the existence of almost a seventh of the world’s population. If we subtract that water from the picture, what’s left are hundreds of millions of climate refugees, desperate, landless, hungry, thirsty.
But these people may be more fortunate than many in the developed world who rely on elaborate infrastructure for their food and water. Why? Because they can simply look up and see the daily changes on these peaks, they’re not tempted by magical thinking and ideologically-motivated denialism, like those whose air-conditioned lives have allowed them to ignore the climate crisis until it’s already upon them.
Warren Senders
environment India Politics: agriculture corporate irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 26: Directly From My Heart To You
India West talks about the economic implications of climate change:
Sustainable development that mitigates the impact of climate change for India’s poor can only be achieved by the devolution of the Indian government, stated prominent social activist Sunita Narain at a March 27 lecture at Arizona State University.
“Getting the model of development right so that everyone has access to health care, water and energy supplies is only achievable when the government is de-centralized,” Narain told India-West in an interview after the lecture, which was organized by ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability.The director general of the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, Narain has received numerous accolades for her work, including the Padma Shri – India’s highest honor – in 2005. In 2007, Narain was named by Time magazine as one of India’s 15 most influential people. Foreign Policy magazine has thrice named Narain one of the world’s best intellectuals.
“Climate change is already hurting the world’s most poor and vulnerable,” stated Narain, explaining that rainwater – a major resource for India’s largely agrarian population – has been inconsistent, with more rainfall, but for a fewer number of days.
“Farmers are very desperate today. This is their livelihood; it is the only thing they know. And we can send them to cities to get jobs, but the urban sector doesn’t have the ability to absorb all those people,” stated Narain.
A smallpox-infested atmospheric blanket offered to the world’s poor. May 14:
As rising levels of carbon dioxide push the greenhouse effect into overdrive, agriculture all over the world is going to be affected; harvests will shrink, crops will come under attack from invasive parasites and diseases, and inevitably subsistence farmers and small landholders in the world’s poorest countries are going to suffer. In comparison to rich and developed countries, Bangladesh’s carbon footprint is statistically insignificant, yet its citizens are facing imminent displacement from their lands, lives and hopes due to rising sea levels — and this is just one example of a worldwide phenomenon. The cruel irony of global warming is that while the greenhouse emissions triggering planetary warming are produced by the richest and most privileged among us, those who are already economically and politically disenfranchised will reap the whirlwind.
History notes many cases of intentional genocide in the service of colonialism and economic expansion. Climate change’s impact on the world’s poorest people wasn’t planned, but that’s no consolation. It falls to the developed world to act responsibly on the climate crisis, or to shoulder the blame for a catastrophe with both environmental and humanitarian dimensions.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: construction housing metaphors
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 25: Castles Made Of Sand
The Ottowa Citizen tells its readers that the ground is shifting beneath their feet:
OTTAWA — We learn from Saturday’s paper that carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is at its highest concentration in the atmosphere in three million years.
Over shouts of “We’re No. 1!”, it might be opportune to mention an unexplored consequence of climate change: our houses are cracking up.
Ottawa is built, with some exceptions, on a vast stretch of what the experts call “sensitive clay soil”, usually referred locally as leda, the old basin of the Champlain Sea.
During a prolonged drought in an urban area, here is the shorthand version of what happens: the band of clay dries out and shrinks, thirsty trees go deeper and further looking for water, buried voids begin to form, the footings of houses begin to slip and sag, and the hapless homeowner arrives home one day asking: “That’s funny, wonder why the front door is sticking?”
Here is a more scientific description from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.
“Sensitive clays have a higher proportion of water among their small particles. These tiny plate-like particles are arranged like a house of cards, holding each other up when the spaces between them are filled with water.
“When there is a severe loss of water, they collapse, leading to a reduction of soil volume and soil shrinkage.”
Everything’s an analogy these days. May 13:
As the clay upon which they’re constructed dries and shrinks, corresponding fault lines appear in Ottowa’s buildings themselves, as walls and foundations attempt to compensate for deep fundamental transformations happening under the surface. On a local level, this may be just a story about houses and soil — but the settling and cracking of ground and concrete is a potent metaphor for the profound and potentially devastating changes now under way everywhere around the world.
The grand edifice of human civilization was made possible by a stable and benign climate which permitted agriculture to flourish, helping us move from a simple struggle for daily survival to the grand and inspiring sweep of our species’ achievements. This complex and interdependent society rests upon countless environmental factors which we have long taken for granted, but which are now threatened by global climate change. If we do not act promptly and responsibly to address the crisis, we will find that the Earth has shifted beneath our feet, leaving our mansion unable to stand.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture forests hubris sustainability timescale
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 24: Born A Poor Young Country Boy
Have you hugged a tree today? The Portland Press-Herald:
Unless people dramatically cut the amount of carbon dioxide they’re putting into the air and water through industry, farming, landfills and fossil fuel consumption, Maine’s largest manufacturing industry will be damaged in ways scientists can only begin to predict.
That’s the conclusion reached by experts who are studying how climate change is likely to affect Maine’s more than 18 million acres of forests.
The nation’s most heavily forested state, Maine is likely to be in for a rude awakening in forestry within the next 20 to 100 years, state specialists predict. Which trees will flourish, and where, will change — gradually over time — and imperceptibly at first to most observers.
Which trees might disappear — literally migrating to reach more congenial growing conditions — and what the survivors will need to protect them from an erratic climate and a host of predators are questions researchers are trying to probe, knowing how difficult such projections can be.
But the implications are huge. In Maine, forests translate into a lot of land, money and jobs.
It’s getting harder and harder for denialists to keep it up…not when there’s real money involved. May 12:
Humanity’s success and prosperity would have been unthinkable without the essentially benign climate which made agriculture possible, setting the stage for our civilization to develop into a complex and planet-wide web. We could not have become who we are without closely cooperating with Earth’s natural cycles over countless thousands of years.
No more.
By releasing eons’ worth of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere in a geological instant, humans have traumatized their environment, with planet-wide consequences, from Maine’s endangered forests, drought-withered Midwestern corn fields, or Bangladeshi farmland inundated by rising sea levels.
These impacts are symptoms of our decision to separate ourselves from the tightly woven fabric of Earthly life. Fighting climate change demands not just that we change our energy economy and find ways to sequester atmospheric CO2, but that we build a relationship with the natural world that is once again based on principles of cooperation, not of competition.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: history sustainability timescale
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 23: There Is A Fountain
The Moose Jaw Times-Herald talks about a visitor to their neighborhood:
“You’re probably sitting here thinking to yourselves, ‘Why us? This is so unfair. This damned thing is going to dominate my life.’ … Get over it.”
That was the tough sentiment veteran freelance journalist and historian Gwynne Dyer brought to dozens of Vanier Collegiate students when he visited the school Thursday to talk about the looming threat of global warming — a topic that he has become familiar with after years of interviews, research, and writing about the topic.
Dyer, who has built an extensive career out of freelancing as a reporter on international affairs and writing about war, geopolitics and climate change over the past several decades, told the story of his investigations into global warming and the measures that governments across the globe are taking to counteract the grim potential outcomes of runaway warming.
“Runaway warming is what will take you right up to five or six degrees higher average global temperature. You hit runaway warming and you lose control when you hit about two degrees higher,” he said. “We know what the planet looked like when it was about six degrees warmer, because there has been times in the past when it was. The last time was about 50 million years ago.”
But, Dyer said, the issue now is one that is man-made, and the result of reintroducing carbon dioxide that has been trapped in the form of fossil fuels into the “closed system” that the Earth has to deal with it, creating a surplus of the greenhouse gas that traps heat.
I won’t call this one of my best, but it’s got a useful point that I’m going to try and develop in other letters. May 10:
The entire span of recorded human history has taken place in a brief interlude of relatively benign planetary climate; in fact, it’s probably accurate to say that the moderate conditions of the past twelve thousand years are what has made human civilization possible, historical records and all. Now, however, the gravest crisis humanity has ever faced is threatening not just our infrastructure and our agriculture, but our entire conception of what it means to be human. The proud history of our species has been painted on the canvas provided by a stable and predictable climate; to unthinkingly tear that canvas asunder with our escalating emissions of greenhouse gases is to replace “history” as we’ve known it with a grim tale of decline: the saddest story ever told.
There is no more time to waste. Only by acting quickly, collectively, and intelligently may we instead make our history one of triumph and humility: the greatest story ever known.
Warren Senders
environment India music: benefit concert
by Warren
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Dancing For The Planet
Navarasa Dance Theater
Nani Agbeli & The Agbekor Society
Zoé Dance Company
Friday, June 21 — 7:00 pm — Boston
On Friday, June 21, three dance companies representing diverse movement traditions will join together to draw attention to the global climate crisis. Featured artists are the Zoé Dance Company, the Navarasa Dance Theater, and Nani Agbeli & The Agbekor Society. The music begins at 7:00 pm, at Emmanuel Church, 15 Newbury Street, Boston, MA. Tickets are $20; $15 students/seniors. All proceeds will go to 350ma, the Massachusetts chapter of the environmental organization www.350.org. For information, please call 781-396-0734, visit “Dancing For The Planet” on Facebook, or send us an email.
“Dancing For The Planet” is the seventh concert in the “Playing For The Planet” series, conceived as a way for creative performers to contribute to the urgent struggle against global warming. Because the climate problem recognizes no national boundaries, the artists represent styles from three different parts of the globe. Their choice of beneficiary, 350MA.org, is focused on building global consensus on reduction of atmospheric CO2 levels — action which climatologists agree is necessary to avoid catastrophic outcomes. It’ll be an evening of brilliant dance and movement — for the central cause of our century.
Purchase tickets online from CCNOW:
Regular admission: $20
Student/Senior Admission: $15
Advance Ticket Orders Are Accepted Until 3 pm on June 21. Orders received after Tuesday, June 18 will be held at the door.
About the Artists
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Navarasa Dance Theater was founded by renowned dancer/choreographer Dr. Aparna Sindhoor. Inspired by the eclectic performing arts traditions and boldly knitting together dance, singing, martial arts, and original music into seamless theatrical presentations, Navarasa’s multilayered, multilingual productions inspire, engage and entertain audiences around the world.
With original movement vocabulary created by choreographers Sindhoor and Anil Natyaveda along with theatrical narratives designed by S M Raju, Navarasa Dance Theater’s work is simultaneously specific and universal.
Navarasa Dance Theater has performed in North America, Asia and Europe and has been presented at various festivals and venues including the Bates Dance Festival, Lincoln Center (NYC), East West Players, LA and NJPAC, Jacob’s Pillow and Asian American Theater Festival, USA; Teesri Duniya Theater, Canada; Amol Palekhar’s Beyond Words Theatre Festival and Bahuroopi National Theatre Festival, India; and Franco Dragone’s INDIA show in Germany. With performing arts training schools in USA and India, Navarasa’s ongoing teaching programs include the “Dance for Everyone” project that offers scholarships and free dance training for underprivileged children and adults.
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Founded in 2002, Zoé Dance has presented works by Callie Chapman Korn, Ivan Korn, Emily Beattie and Meghan Ballog. Zoé Dance nurtures the art of dance, dance theatre and performance through accessible performance venues, educates the public and creates social awareness through themes explored in repertory, and has presented its work since 2002 in various venues and performance opportunities around Boston and internationally such as: World Music/CRASH Arts’ “Ten’s the Limit” (2005 and 2007), ArtBeat 2004 and 2009, “Virgin”, produced by the Dance Renewal Project, Harvard Square’s “May Fair” 2004, with the Choreographers Group 2004, Earth Dance’s Outdoor Performance Festival 2003, Corporación Cultural de Las Condes (Santiago, Chile) 2007, Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery as a featured artist of the Movement at the Mills residency.
Zoe has also presented its work at the Dance Complex, Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, Tower Auditorium at Massachuestts College of Art, the Boston Common, Union Square Plaza, and Green Street Studios. Zoé Dance was awarded a project grant from the Somerville Arts Council (2010) and was a finalist for the Boston Dance Alliance’s Rehearsal and Retreat Fellowship (2009).
Callie Chapman Korn (artistic director): Callie holds a B.F.A. from the Boston Conservatory. With Zoé, Callie has presented her work in venues such as CrashArts‘ “Ten’s the Limit” at the ICA and Green Street Studios, Corporacion Cultural de Las Condes (Santiago, Chile), multiple self-produced concerts, festivals, part of the Dance Renewal Project’s “Virgin”, Dance Complex’s Shared Choreographers Concert. She currently dances for Prometheus Dance and has worked with artists such as: Nicola Hawkins, Karen Murphy and Emily Beattie. She has collaborated with video artists Greg Shea and Ken Kinna, composer Ivan Korn, and composers/musicians Pancho Molina and Billy Herron. Callie also helped develop the Dance Renewal Project and is currently the Marketing and Design Associate for the Boston Dance Alliance.
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Known for his energy, athleticism, and precision on stage, the charismatic Nani Kwashi Agbeli is a native of the Ewe from the Volta Region of Ghana, W. Africa. He received his drum and dance training from his father, Godwin K. Agbeli, who was the chairman of the National Folkloric Company at the Arts Council of Ghana. Nani performed with and led the cultural group Sankofa Root II in Ghana where they received many awards.
For nine years, he served as the lead drum and dance instructor at the Dagbe Cultural Center, a school that trains domestic and international students in Ghanaian traditional arts, and is now on the faculty of the Music Department at Tufts University, where he and directs the Kiniwe Ensemble and teaches an integrated curriculum in the traditional singing, drumming and dancing of Ghana.
Nani also teaches Ghanaian dance and drumming at Brandeis University and Mount Holyoke College, along with Berklee College of Music, the Edna Manley School in Jamaica, Bowling Green University, and the University of Virginia, among others. He currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
The Agbekor Drum & Dance Society began in 1979 as a project to study and perform repertory from Africa, primarily focusing on two separate repertoires: Ewe and Dagomba. The homeland of the Ewe people is along the Atlantic Coast of western Africa in the nation states of Ghana and Togo. The Dagomba homeland is in savanna grasslands several hundred miles to the north and the lands of their traditional kingdom, Dagbon, are entirely within the current borders of Ghana. In Ewe drumming, each instrument has a specific rhythm that it repeats over and over. Riding on this musical wave, so to speak, the lead drum sends musical signals that cue dancers when to do their different variations. In Dagomba dance-drumming, four different drum parts intertwine their variations. In both Ewe and Dagomba traditions, each item of repertory has its unique purpose, meaning, history, and performance personality.
In their frequent collaborations with Ghanaian master drummers, the Agbekor Society continues to renew its connection with its African sources. The Society has appeared in clubs, concerts, lecture-demonstrations and festivals throughout New England, and in collaborations with jazz and “world music” artists like Natraj, Antigravity and the Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra.
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About www.350.org and the number 350:
Co-founded by environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, 350.org is the hub of a worldwide network of over two hundred environmental organizations, all with a common target: persuading the world’s countries to unite in an effort to reduce global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million or less. Climatologist Dr. James Hansen says, “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced to at most 350 ppm.” (Dr. Hansen headed the NASA Institute for Space Studies in New York City, and is best known for his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue.) Activists involved in the 350 movement include Rajendra Pachauri (Chairman, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Vandana Shiva (world-renowned environmental leader and thinker), Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1984 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and a global activist on issues pertaining to democracy, freedom and human rights), Van Jones, Bianca Jagger, Dr. James Hansen, Barbara Kingsolver and many more.
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Warren Senders is the contact person for “Dancing For The Planet.” He is one of thousands of concerned global citizens hoping to trigger positive change through social action and the arts. He can be reached at warvij@verizon.net or by telephone at 781-396-0734.
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“Dancing For The Planet” will be pleased to supply photographs and promotional materials for each of the artists performing at this event.
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility Keystone XL Tar Sands
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 22: Just You, Just Me
The Houston Chronicle offers space to a petroleum-industry shill:
The environmentalist activist community has a new Public Enemy No. 1: Keystone XL. That’s the proposed 1,200-mile pipeline linking Canadian oil fields to Texas refineries. The project is up for debate at the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology this week – the latest in what is now a four-year-long national debate on the project. The facts have become nearly smothered by the small but vocal opposition, but the fact is the Keystone XL pipeline offers a safe, efficient and affordable means of transporting the resources our nation needs.
Block the Keystone XL pipeline and Americans are going to see a nation that is less energy-secure, an economic recovery further stymied and prospects for growth jeopardized. Perhaps most important for the activists who oppose it – a vastly increased chance for spills and other environmental incidents.
While the debate that surrounds the Keystone XL pipeline has been continuous for years, opponents to the transcontinental energy initiative coalesced early on in the process.
Unburdened by facts and uninterested in offering arguments to support their positions, opponents to Keystone XL have been willing to lob unsupported claim after unsubstantiated attack over and over again.
Lost in all of this rhetorical wind? The most salient fact: If Keystone XL is blocked, America’s demand for oil will remain undiminished, and so, too, will the appetite to develop the Canadian oil resources that opponents of the pipeline deride.
I just dashed this off in a state of dudgeon, and it shows. Busy busy busy today. May 11:
Michael Economides’ writing in support of the Keystone XL pipeline is a textbook example of rhetorical contortion in the service of an addiction. The “dilbit” (diluted bitumen oil) from the Alberta tar sands needs both higher pressure and temperature to flow through pipelines — factors linked to increased corrosion and rupture. That the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration doesn’t connect pipeline failures to tar sands oil only underlines that causality is complex. In fact, pipelines in the Midwest that move this sort of heavy crude have spilled almost four times more per pipeline mile than the U.S. average. The recent disasters in Arkansas and Kalamazoo both involved dilbit. It’s terrible stuff, and the only way to keep it safe is to leave it in the ground.
The underlying assumption in Mr. Economides’ piece is that our national oil habit cannot, must not, will not change — and therefore our energy economy has no choice but to feed our craving for a fossil-fuel fix. Spoken like a pusher. There are plenty of alternatives, but none that offer Mr. Economides the perquisites he so obviously relishes as a mouthpiece of the fossil fuel industry.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility Joe Biden Keystone XL Tar Sands
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 21: The Conservative Id, Yes, The Conservative Id
We have a minority vice-president. WaPo:
Environmentalists have seized on a comment Vice President Biden made while working a rope line in Columbia, S.C., on Friday, in which he told an activist he is “in the minority” within the administration when it comes to opposing the Keystone XL pipeline.
Elaine Cooper, who serves on the executive committee of the Sierra Club’s South Caroline chapter, said in an interview Wednesday that Biden shared his thoughts with her during Rep. James Clyburn’s (D-S.C.) annual fish fry.
Buzzfeed first reported the vice president’s remarks late Tuesday, based on an e-mail a colleague of Cooper had sent to fellow environmentalists.
Cooper, who was wearing a black-and-white leather hat, said she attracted the vice president’s attention and was able to ask him about the controversial proposal to ship heavy crude oil from Canada to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast.
” ‘Sir, do you support rejecting the Keystone pipeline?’ ” Cooper recalled asking Biden. “And he responded, ‘Yes, I do support rejecting the Keystone pipeline, but I’m in the minority.’ And he smiled back at me.”
Good for Joe. How about good for us? May 9:
It’s an enduring irony: in a corporatized political system, the only position in government offering almost complete freedom of expression is the one John Nance Garner so memorably characterized as “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Vice-Presidents have for years expressed their constituents’ true sentiments in ways that chief executives cannot; think of Nixon under Eisenhower, and Spiro Agnew’s turn as “Nixon’s Nixon” a decade later, the voice of the conservative American id.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, channels our collective superego, as witness his emergence as an eloquent and compassionate advocate of marriage equality. Nowhere is Mr. Biden’s finely-honed moral sensibility more evident than in his recent outspoken opposition to that planetary disaster-in-the-making, the Keystone XL pipeline. Unlike some who’ve held his office, Joe Biden elevates the vice-presidency with an eloquent expression of the better angels of our nature. Let’s hope he has the president’s ear.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility ethics Keystone XL Tar Sands
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 20: My Biggest Mistake Was Loving You Too Much
Even Forbes Magazine thinks the KXL is a disaster in the making:
With over 16,000 sensors tied to automatic shut-offs, the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline (as in Xtra-Large) is not your father’s pipeline. However, it’s still a pipeline, and the long history of ruptures, leaks, spills and other “incidents” call attention to the problems that face all pipelines in America.
We just don’t maintain them like we should.
And it’s the same for all critical infrastructure. The corporations that build and operate this infrastructure talk about all the bells and whistles they have to make them safe, and promise to do so, but history says differently. Decades after these things are built, the industry just doesn’t care anymore.
It’s not that these pipelines and rigs can’t be run safely, it’s that they aren’t. Maybe the managers and operators who originally built them once cared, but after they’ve retired or died, the new managers don’t have the same ownership.
Hippie. May 7:
Whether it’s coal or oil, the core mentality underlying fossil fuel is essentially simple-minded: make a hole in the ground and burn the stuff that comes out. When your goal is to enrich your investors, then it’s good business to transfer the costs and consequences of leaks, spills, collapses, and containment failures to ordinary people, who’ll take care of it with their tax dollars. Furthermore, given the short attention span of most citizens, TransCanada and other pipeline promoters have nothing to lose by downplaying the risks and inflating the benefits of projects like the Keystone XL — and nothing to gain by making huge investments in safety, infrastructure, and maintenance.
As a path to riches, it’s not complicated — but as a way to encourage good citizenship, it’s a failure. As the climate crisis intensifies, the extractive industries can no longer ignore the grave moral dimensions of their environmental irresponsibility.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies disease parasites
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 19: Clippety-Clop, Clippety-Clop
And heeeeeere’s Plague, right on time. WaPo:
FRESNO, Calif. — California and federal public health officials say that valley fever, a potentially lethal but often misdiagnosed disease infecting more and more people across the nation, has been on the rise as a warming climate and drought have kicked up the dust that spreads it.
The fever has hit California’s agricultural heartland particularly hard in recent years, with the incidence dramatically increasing in 2010 and 2011. The disease — which is prevalent in arid regions of the United States, Mexico, Central and South America — can be contracted by breathing in fungus-laced spores from dust disturbed by the wind as well as human or animal activity.
The fungus is sensitive to environmental changes, experts say, and a hotter, drier climate has increased the dust carrying the spores.
I’ve used this analogy once or twice before and gotten results. May 6:
The problem of illegal immigration is far worse than even the most xenophobic demagogue could imagine. Incomprehensible numbers of unauthorized visitors still barely register on the radar of our governing class.
As climate change intensifies, we’re going to meet disease-carrying insects, fungi, and micro-organisms that have never before appeared in the continental United States. Propelled by the same essential needs that motivate humans — somewhere to live, eat, thrive and reproduce — they’ll move to American soil as environmental conditions transform in response to the accelerating greenhouse effect. The spread of Valley Fever in California is just one example.
Right-wing lawmakers and media figures rail against border-crossers who “parasitically” exploit our economic resources. But these conservative grandstanders cannot acknowledge that the plethora of genuinely dangerous parasites arriving in the wake of the climate crisis will be undeterred by grand border fences, punitive laws, or moats filled with alligators.
Warren Senders